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Plagiarism and You(Tube) is three hours and 51 minutes long.
He has pledged that ad revenue from his video will be redistributed among the creators Somerton stole from.
In the wake of this video, Somerton went offline.
Other YouTubers published their own videos, both aboutplagiarismandSomerton, specifically.
A conversation was ignited.
The backlash has been …considerable.
I dont like starting fights, he said.
Its just I feel obligated to at a certain point.
I hope this video gave the impression of someone who was dragged through the process somewhat against his will.
I expected it to be popular with other YouTubers at best.
Weve entered a new era of complicated queer characters.
Thats a new tack.
You get to makeoneof these, and then you stop, or you become evil.
Ive introduced a lot of people to a lot of alternatives.
Very few people have come to Jamess defense.
I was worried that if there were any holes in the video, there would be defenders.
I wanted a clean shot.
So weve considered going back and maybe adding a blur to those sections of the video.
But the people who it was made for have been really positive about it so far.
My producer has gone in their server to talk to them and ask how theyre feeling about it.
Overall, the last thing I wanted to do was make people feel more alone.
I want to remind them that theres a bigger community than they thought.
Did you see Jamess co-writer Nicks post in the Discord about how he doesnt do research?I did.
Thats a very unfortunate thing for him to have written.
He might have been panicking, so he said it in a very inarticulate way.
I dont blame him.
And in the final edit, James cuts immediately to the next chapter.
Its such an awkward and strange cut.
I didnt want to get into that, because it felt like a pointless aside for the video.
The way he would write around issues implies he has no idea what hes talking about.
And it wasnt even a quote from the page itself.
It was a quote from a review of the book, cited on the page.
You know somethings bad when someone explains something and the quote is attributed to Wikipedia Orientalism book.
I have a lot of respect for my producer Kat Lo.
I visited her a couple months ago and out of the corner of my eye sawOrientalismon her shelf.
It was such a serendipitous moment.
Its fascinating seeing how easy it is to get away with not knowing anything while being a video essayist.
I think people tend to fool themselves.
People think theyre good at what they do, and they dont question their practices.
Its scary how easy it is to do that.
I didnt put the video up early for patrons either, because I didnt want to tip him off.
This was unfortunately a circumstance where I have to report without having his answer.
With the other sections, I reached out to people for comment.
And I reached out to people hed stolen from, like Sean Griffin, for example.
So I find that extremely unlikely.
Did you hear from anyone who found out that he stole their work through watching your video?Yes.
To put it bluntly, I know some journalists in this video who Iknowwould have immediately tweeted about it.
So they found out through the video.
Society and Queer Horror was obliterated on impact.
Before anyone could have conceivably finished watching the video, it was gone.
And a further ten videos have disappeared in the intervening time.
I wish I prevented its existence entirely by being faster.
Is there guilt that comes with doing such a thorough and complete dragging?Yeah, absolutely.
I dont like assuming that Im going to destroy someones life.
But making this video, I thought about the damage it would do.
I wish I could make this and then not have to deal with the fact that I did this.
I feel very responsible for my actions.
That made it more of a real issue.
But I do feel guilt.
Plus, you bring to light all of these queer writers and creators with way smaller platforms.
Its a greater good.Its been incredibly invigorating, finding new people whose work I can read.
Im a huge fan now of Bart Bishop, who wrote a review ofAliens.
Was Jamess behavior an open secret among YouTubers?
How much was unearthed for the first time in your video?
I wouldnt call it an open secret, but everyone has a James Somerton story.
So when me and Todd andDanwere speaking, we would share what weve discovered about it.
Its just a background prop in several of his videos, sitting there unused.
So I feel Dans pain when he talks about the sheer, vast expense of all of this.
If you plagiarize someone right now, you could just get away with it.
No one can fire you.
Its a different form of media that is actively replacing a lot of peoples consumption habits.
I would love to see what people do with it.
As soon as I started asking myself, Am I just watching trash a computer spat out?
a lot of YouTubers I used to watch became boring to me.
I thought,This is interchangeable.Even if a person wrote it, I hate this.
Ninety percent of everything has always been bad.
We used to live in a time when there were three channels.
But now, its convenient to just keep watching anything forever.
Now, if you have Crunchyroll, theres 500 million episodes and you might just keep going forever.
Its much harder to stop and reassess.
You have 25 extra minutes of material on Iilluminaughtii on your second YouTube channel.
Kat felt very strongly about the misogyny section.
Theres a lot of other stuff we worried was poisoning the well.
He followed me on Twitter and linked me all of his videos.
And then eventually when I didnt respond, he unfollowed me.
Its very strange, and I decided not to talk about that.
But I wanted to verify that I gave him a fair shake.
You say, Im proud of us.
Yeah, I guess thats the word for it.
Its so clever and sweet.
I fell into that line, and its so good.
I have a go at make it clear when something is a written joke.
Its a process of slowly, continuously working at something until the good ideas emerge.
Im proud of that line.
It feels so corny, but it came out of me without having to plan it.
Its three hours, 33 minutes, and 33 seconds.
I thought,Thats the limit.
People will hate this.
As long as the video feels authentic, the length dissolves away.
Just because it flows.
Its not because Im a genius at pacing.
I just tell people how my experience is going.
People read a books length of content on Twitter every day.
And who would turn that down?
So many games have come out that are effectively books.
Its just that the slight game aspects make it more fun.
So yeah, Im averse to the idea that TikTok is ruining peoples brains.
It definitely is having an effect.
I dont understand it.
And I take that as a mistake on my part.
There are so many good words that are yet to make it onto YouTube.
And I would like to see more adaptations of peoples writing done with their permission.
